Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day032.16
Last-Modified: 2000/07/25
Searching hopefully for evidence of
"anti-Semitism" in me, the investigation by he Board of
Deputies in 1992 came up empty handed in their secret
report which they planted on Canadian government files.
They confirmed that I had dealings with my Jews in my
professional life, and they added that I "used this as an
excuse" to say that I am not an anti-Semite. These people
are hard to please. "He is far too clever an opponent"
the Board wrote in this secret report, "to openly admit to
being an anti-Semite". "We endorse all condemnation of
anti-Semitism", they quote me as writing in my newsletter
back in 1982. All of these things, including the actual
1992 secret intelligence report filed by he Board of
Deputies, were disclosed to these Defendants in my
discovery. The Defendants quoted a passage from a speech
delivered, they said, in May 1992. In fact, as my diary
confirms, it was delivered in May 1993. So it may be that
the year was not accidental, because by that time my
family and I had been subjected to a catalogue of insults
by the leaders of these various bodies. If a writer's
books are banned and burnt, his bookshops are smashed, his
hands are manacled, his person insulted, his printers are
burnt down, his access to the world's archives is denied,
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his family's livelihood is destroyed, his phone lines are
jammed with obscene and threatening phone calls, death
threats, his house is beset by violent, angry mobs, the
walls and posts around his address are plastered with
stickers inciting the public to violence against him, and
a wreath is sent to him with a foul and taunting message
on the death of his oldest daughter, then it ill-behoves
people to offer cheap criticism if the writer finally
commits the occasional indiscretion and lapse in referring
to the people who are doing it to him.
I singled out in this -- well, I am not going to
comment at length on these evil allegations and slurs.
They lend fire and fury to the original libel complained
of, that is my view. I submit that the word "racism" in
the ears of the man in the Clapham Omnibus is about
Stephen Lawrence and cone heads in the Ku Klux Klan. It
conjures up images of murder and thuggery and violence and
foul-mouthed graffiti. In deliberating on the conduct of
the case and on the appropriate scale of damages, your
Lordship will no doubt bear them in mind, these
allegations made against me.
I voluntarily provided all my entire private
diaries to the Defendants in this action. They asked to
see a few pages and I said "take the lot". Fifty-nine
volumes of private diaries, 20 million words on paper and
on disk. Mr Rampton produced from them one nineteen-word
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ditty attached to another quite harmless one about the
"messica dressica" of my daughter Jessica. To find in
all those diaries and telephone conversations written
since 1959 just one nineteen-word ditty that you could
trot out for the media, does not suggest that I am as
obsessed with race and racism as learned counsel and, for
that matter, the newspapers that report this case too.
I repeat, this multi-million dollar Defence team
has found one nineteen-word nonsense poem, recorded in my
diary with other Lear- or Belloc-type rhythmic verses as
having been recited to my own nine-month old infant who
has, I am glad to say, grown into a delightful girl of six
now, bearing none of the traces of the poison that
Mr Rampton recklessly suggested that I had fed to her.
Fortunately, I did not sing to her "Three Blind Mice".
Similarly, from my hundreds of lectures and
talks these very proper spaniels have sniffed out a few
lines of music-hall whit of the type that a Dave Allen
might indulge in, with Mr Trevor McDonald as one of the
butts. That in Mr Rampton's words is racism. One wonders
which well-shielded part of the modern world is inhabited
by learned counsel. Can anyone go and live there?
The references that I have made to what is now
formally called the Instrumentalization of the Holocaust,
have also been adduced as evidence of anti-Semitism. Are
non-Jews disbarred from making a criticism that is made
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increasing vocally now by others like Professor Peter
Novak or by Leon Weiseltier, the literary editor of the
New Republic who wrote on May 3rd 1993: "It is a sad
fact, said the principal philanthropist of the grotesque
Simon Wiesenthal Centre of Los Angeles, that Israel and
Jewish education and all the other familiar buzz words no
longer seem to rally Jews behind the community, the
Holocaust though works every time."
I turn to page 89, my Lord, the third
paragraph. In general, I would invite your Lordship to
pick out one such utterance as a sample, to reach then for
the transcript of the entire speech, to take note of the
rest of its content, its clear reference to the very real
sufferings of the Jews, the liquidations, the Bruns report
and the rest, and then ask: Was the remark true? Was it
explicable? Was it rhetorically justified as part of the
skilled lecturer's armoury?
Your Lordship has been told of my remarks that
more women died on Kennedy's back seat than in the gas
chamber at Auschwitz, the one shown to the tourists. It
is a tasteless but quite literally true. It is, as I have
shown in this court, even true if the main gas chamber at
Birkenau is brought into the equation, crematorium (ii),
the factory of death, because the eyewitnesses lied about
that one too. The Poles have admitted that the Auschwitz
building and its chimney are a post-1948 fake. My
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colourful language, my tasteless language, was a
rhetorical way of bringing that extraordinary revelation
home to audiences.
The audiences, I am told, are extreme audiences,
of extreme people, although the photographs suggest rather
differently. They appear rather boring middle-age kind of
people.
My files confirm that I occasionally addressed
audiences of the Association for Free Journalism in
Germany, the National Democratic Party in Germany and the
German Peoples Union. My Lord, those four documents which
I have disclosed to the Defendants, they are English
translations of the policy leaflets, the manifestos of
these bodies, and in my submission they do not show them
to be extreme in any way. These were, furthermore, bodies
that were accepted at that time under Germany's very
strict laws as being legal and constitutional. But the
court is more concerned, I believe, with have individual
personages than with bodies, than with the actual
organizations. I have not the slightest doubt that this
court will find that I had no meaningful contact with the
ugly rag-bag neo-Nazi extremists mentioned by Professor
Funke, people with whom, to make the point quite clearly,
the Defendants, their experts and their legal team seem
more familiar than I. Most of the names were completely
unknown to me and the Defence have sought, in vein, for
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them in my diaries and papers, to which I emphasise yet
again I gave them complete and unlimited privileged
access. This has not stopped them from bringing these
names forward and mentioning these alleged links in the
open court in an attempt to smear me still further with an
eye particularly on the German media. I urge that this,
their conduct of the case, be held against them.
Characteristically of the weakness of their
case, Professor Funke listed one entry in a diary where
I noted "road journey with a Thomas" whose second name
I never learned; Funke entered the name "Dienel?" So for
as I know, I have never met a Dienel, but it illustrates
the kind of evidence that the Defence were hoping to rely
upon.
As for Michael Kuhnen, the documentary evidence
before both Professor Funke when he wrote his report and
before this court, is that I explicitly said I would not
attend any function at which he was even present. I never
did and I never met him.
By way of evidence the court has been shown a
number of videos. Shorn of their commercial packaging,
they do not amount to very much, in my submission. In
view of the weight attached to it by learned counsel and
by his witness Professor Funke, my Lord, I have
re-examined the raw video of Halle function of November
9th 1991 at which I briefly spoke, and I have timed and
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listed the scenes that it shows. My Lord, you will see in
the footnote on that page that I have given the
appropriate breakdown referring to the time on the video.
Your Lordship may wish at sometime to have the
video back to check that these times are correct, or the
Defendants' solicitors may wish to submit any corrections
they feel are needed.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No. I will assume your time is correct
unless I am told otherwise.
MR IRVING: Yes, unless otherwise informed. The raw details
are, when the when camera's meter shows 170021 I am first
seen arriving at an unnamed hotel restaurant in Halle,
accompanied by Mrs Worch and by David Leigh of he Sunday
Observer. At 17:14:40 I am again glimpsed, 14 minutes
later, still at the hotel speaking to a reporter. The
cameraman and David Leigh then go off to film the rival
processions during which I am at no time seen on film. In
fact I remained lunching at the hotel. At 18:11:00 a
truck is seen being rigged as an open-air platform, and at
18:14:26 I am seen with two reporters watching from the
edge of the square. In my submission, my Lord, I do not
have a particularly happy look on my face at all at what
I am seeing.
At 18:16 I walk over to the platform, hands in
pockets and mount it. The man whom Professor Funke tells
us is Dienel, and I have no way of checking it one way or
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the other, is seen to get off to the left and there is no
contact whatever between him and me. Mr Worch briefly
introduces me to the audience. I begin speaking at
18:16:39 and the filmed portion of my speech ends less
than three and a half minutes later.
When the off-screen chanting of slogans begins
at 18:18:59 I am clearly seen to interrupt my speech,
shake my head at them and gesticulate with my left hand to
them to stop, and I am clearly heard to say, "You must
not", because they are shouting the "Siegheil" slogans,
Mein Fuhrer, and things like, "you must not always be
thinking of the past". I am heard clearly to say: "You
must always be thinking of the past. You must not keep
coming out with the slogans of the past. We are thinking
of the future [voice emphasised] of Germany. We are
thinking of the future of the German people. As an
Englishman I have to say ...", and so on. So I am quite
clearly expressing extreme anger at these people who have
come along with their Nazi slogans.
Six seconds after ending my brief speech I am
seen to leave the platform without further contact with
anybody. My diary notes that I at once left by car and
drove back to the Rhur in Western Germany.
Heavily edited, for example to remove my rebuke
to these slogan-shouting people, whom I took and take to
have been agents provocateurs, this sequence was shown on
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November 28th and 29th to British TV audiences in a "This
Week" programme entitled "Hitler's Children, the New
Nazis", directed by the German Michael Schmidt, Professor
Funke's star witness, and with none other than Gerald
Gable of Searchlight listed as the consultant, and in
Despatches on the other channel. This indicates whose
hands were behind the editing. Again, heavily edited the
film has been shown around the world against me. This was
the thrice edited film to which I drew your Lordship's
attention in suggesting there was evidence of dubious
admissibility.
May I again remind your Lordship of my basic
principle on lecturing. Unlike the Defendants who have
proudly stated that they refuse to debate with opponents,
I have expressed a readiness to attend, to address all and
any who are willing to listen. Your Lordship will
remember my letter of June 24th 1988 to my editor William
Morrow, Connie Roosevelt, to whom I wrote:
"I have been invited to speak as a guest
speaker at a right-wing function in Los Angeles next
February. They have offered a substantial fee and all my
expenses, and until now I have adopted a policy of never
refusing an invitation if the speakers meet my terms,
namely a free speech and a fat fee. On this occasion
I intend to give the audience a piece of mind about some
of their lunatic views."
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I may secondly point out that were it not for
the clandestine activities of the violent and extremist
bodies dedicated to destroy my right to free speech and
the rights of all audiences in the United States and
elsewhere, at Berkley, at Dublin, Pretoria or wherever, to
hear my opponents and equally dedicated to intimidating my
publishers and smashing bookstall windows, where it not
for their hate campaign I would have been able to continue
in the normal manner with my exemplary professional
career. It rings hollow that the same shabby bodies who
have generated the hatred against me now point their
crooked finger at my and abuse me using the very
considerable privileges afforded to them by this court, to
continuing to make my voice heard whenever I can. When
I use words to describe them in detail, which they well
deserve, they ring their hands lament about extremism.
I have pointed out that so far as Germany is
concerned, none of the German bodies who invited me to
speak was illegal or banned. In fact when first invited
to address the German Peoples Union I wrote to and
telephoned the Germany Embassy, as the documents in my
discovery show, and asked them specifically whether this
was a legal and constitutional body. The Embassy
confirmed in writing on July 25th 1984 that was. The
extremism was in the eye of beholder. The further to the
left the beholder squinted from, the more distant these
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bodies may have seem from him.
We have heard a lot from Professor Funke, the
sociologist of the Free University in Berlin. My Lord,
I am now going to pass over the next two pages and
continue from the bottom of page 94. As for his
allegation, the allegation by Professor Funke, here in
court, my Lord, I also ask you to disregard those two pages.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think I know why, and I think that is
very right and proper.
MR IRVING: As for his allegation here in court that I should
have known that various allegations were going to be
banned in years ahead, it is difficult for an Englishmen
coming from a country with deeper democratic traditions
than Professor Funke's, to implant himself into the brain
or mindset of the authoritarian German mould where book
burning is now once again de rigueur, where a German
academic like Funke does not bat an eyelid upon hearing
that a teacher is still serving a seven-year jail sentence
imposed for chairing a lecture at which I spoke, where two
District Court judges who acquitted that teacher were
reprimanded and finally retired in disgrace by order of
the Minister of Justice, and where governments recently
have begun routinely banning fringe opposition parties and
circumscribing even their legal activities.
My general response to this attempt at "guilt by
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association" which we have seen a lot over the last few
weeks, is to compare it with the worst accesses of the
inquisitions conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In
Britain the courts have always viewed it as repugnant;
most recently I believe Morland J in another court in the
same building. Hollywood's finest scriptwriters, many of
them Jewish, had their careers vernichtet, to use that
word again, by the reckless allegation that they had
associated with known communists. Now come these
Defendants levelling the mirror image of these same
charges at me. McCarthyism was rightly exposed for what
it was in more recent years and more enlightened years,
and these Defendants for their own purposes are seeking to
turn the clock back.
As far as the United States are concerned, apart
from the Institute of Historical Review, which I shall
deal with separately, the one organization identified by
learned counsel for the Defence, as I understand it, is
the National Alliance. First let me point out that, no
doubt with good reason, the Defendants have decided not to
call their expert on political extremism in the United
States, Professor Levin, and they have withdrawn his
expert report. I think "junked" was the word. Mr Rampton
used the word "junked" or "dumped" I believe. Had they
not I would have "debunked" it I think. We have,
therefore, no general expert evidence as to the nature of
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he National Alliance, and I think I ought to emphasise
that matter. The court is probably as much in the dark
about this group as anybody else.
The Defence invites the court to study the
leaflets put about by that body at one meeting, but could
offer to the court not the slightest evidence that I was
aware of such leaflets or, for that matter, if they are
once again falling back on negligence, that I ought to
have been aware of them.
If, as I submit, the meetings were organized by
individual friends of mine acting outside whatever their
capacity, if any, within the National Alliance may have
been, there is no reason why I should have read such
leaflets if they were indeed on offer.
As for the IHR, the Institute of Historical
Review, I have little to add to what I have stated in my
various written replies and on the witness stand. It is
clearly unsatisfactory, though not surprising, that
establishment scholars feel the need to dismiss any rival
body of scholars or historians as extremists, merely on
the basis that these others propagate a different version
of history from their own consensus versions.

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